Saturday, March 11, 2017

She can take care of herself

I warned her as graphically as I could that she was already well down the slippery slope leading to poverty and misery—that, as I knew from the experience of untold patients, she would soon have a succession of possessive, exploitative, and violent boyfriends, unless she changed her life. I told her that in the past few days, I had seen two women patients who had had their heads rammed down the lavatory, one who had had her head smashed through a window and her throat cut on the shards of glass, one who had had her arm, jaw, and skull broken, and one who had been suspended by her ankles from a tenth-floor window to the tune of, "Die, you bitch!"

"I can look after myself," said my 17-year-old.

"But men are stronger than women," I said. "When it comes to violence, they are at an advantage."

"That's a sexist thing to say," she replied.

A girl who had absorbed nothing at school had nevertheless absorbed the shibboleths of political correctness in general and of feminism in particular.

"But it's a plain, straightforward, and inescapable fact," I said.

"It's sexist," she reiterated firmly.

A stubborn refusal to face inconvenient facts, no matter how obvious, now pervades our attitude toward relations between the sexes. An ideological filter of wishful thinking strains out anything we'd prefer not to acknowledge about these eternally difficult and contested relations, with predictably disastrous results.

As a general rule, "I can look after myself" is a reliable signal that the individual uttering the phrase is not only incapable of looking after himself, but also lacks the judgment to realize that he cannot.

"But men are stronger than women" is a horribly sexist thing to say, until it's the basis for preemptively finding all men guilty of being rapists and abusers, then it's back to being an incontrovertible biological fact.

No, she can't, but the only practical and realistic way to convince her of that is to let her go forward as if she can. The caveat to letting her do that, of course, is to let her know that whatever decisions she makes are final, that the results of them are hers, AND HERS ALONE to live with, forever. If that means being beaten nearly to death on multiple occasions by abusive boyfriends, living in perpetual poverty, or doing hard jail time for crimes committed under the influence of bad-boy thug boyfriends to whom she CHOSE to submit, then so be it. There's just no going back.

TL;DR version: women only learn (MAYBE) through the school of violent knocks, since they are incapable of either logic, long-term/big-picture vision, or grasping cause and effect.

I sometimes think that reviving the concept of "human zoos" might not be such a bad thing. Putting what remains of a stupid young girl-child in such an enclosure after she's spent years ignoring the counsel of her elders and suffering for it accordingly might --just MIGHT-- deter a few other mushy-headed young estrogen vessels from treading the same destructive path.

Believe me, I know. My own (now 38-year-old) daughter chose to "do it [her] way" as an 18-year-old, despite all that her mother and I tried to teach her otherwise. She's still paying for it twenty years later, and will continue to pay for it for the rest of her life. The silver lining (if you can call it that) is that we let her suffer the consequences of her decisions, which eventually woke her up to reality. She now evangelizes HARD to younger women and girls about not letting "tingles" rule, using herself as an example of the consequences of caving in to feeeeeeeeeeeeeelings. Sometimes they listen, sometimes they don't, but they have reality staring them in the face each time they get the message. Sometimes "tough love" is the only medicine that has any chance at all of working.

Girls are raised on a constant, unending, ridiculous stream of male fantasies. Except that these fantasies are created by guys like John Scalzi and Joss Whedon.

I had a sergeant who let one of these fantasies end under reasonably controlled circumstances.

There was a young Woman Marine in his shop who was twenty years old and had a second degree black belt.

You have never heard anyone talk so much shit in your life as this chick did. She simply would not shut up about how much of a bad ass she was and just how certain she was that she could take anyone in the unit due to the super powers imbued by her black belt. She was 5'5 and weighed 120 lbs.

Finally her shit talking pissed off "Smitty" who invited her to, "step-up." She was genuinely delighted to have the opportunity show off. So under my sergeant's supervision and "without my knowledge" they squared off.

She started with a leg sweep. (*I know Vox is laughing at that*) "Smitty" shook his leg as if it stung a little and then stepped in to pound her on the temple with a wild and inelegant haymaker. She was knocked clean out.

Naturally everyone else in the shop immediately tried to white knight like crazy and jump on "Smitty". But my sergeant shut them down. "No! She wanted this. She knew the terms when she went in. She. Wanted. This. To. Happen."

I will say she actually learned her lesson. She was never that, in your face, again. I guess she had figured out that the wind that was in her sails had been artificial all along.

All the more surprising is it to me, therefore, that the nurses perceive things differently. They do not see a man's violence in his face, his gestures, his deportment, and his bodily adornments, even though they have the same experience of the patients as I. They hear the same stories, they see the same signs, but they do not make the same judgments. What's more, they seem never to learn; for experience—like chance, in the famous dictum of Louis Pasteur—favors only the mind prepared. And when I guess at a glance that a man is an inveterate wife beater (I use the term "wife" loosely), they are appalled at the harshness of my judgment, even when it proves right once more.

They cant see it, because they are attracted to the violent men. And before anyone starts bitching about how all women are useless, let realoze that we see the same behavior in men. How often do we see some "wounded little bird" elicit all sorts of sympathy from men who should know better, when in actuality the "little bird" is a filthy sociopath who causes pain and suffering to everyone around her? A hot female could set fire to an orphanage and youd have. Amlb of beta cucks running to defend the misunderstood little angel.

Still, that's a little better than the hordes of brainwashed-by-Hollywood women who think a ridiculously slow high kick is a great fighting move, or that their "3rd degree black belt" earned through formalized sparring is going to help them when some 225 pound dude grabs them from behind in a parking garage.

Too many girls growing up without brothers/cousins. I'm several years older than my younger brother, and even when I outweighed him (before puberty) he could wrestle me to the ground pretty much whenever he wanted. This is with two siblings who were playing and not trying to hurt each other. Brothers and cousins are (IME) vital in demonstrating to young women just how they can't keep up.

She started with a leg sweep. (*I know Vox is laughing at that*) "Smitty" shook his leg as if it stung a little and then stepped in to pound her on the temple with a wild and inelegant haymaker. She was knocked clean out.

I wouldn't expect her to win, but anybody with even average martial arts training (of either sex) shouldn't fall to a single "wild and inelegant haymaker". Sadly, there are a lot of "martial arts" classes that are mostly about babysitting your kids while you relax for an hour and feel like a good parent. Spent a lot of time in one of those myself as a kid. Fortunately, I didn't have to figure it out the hard way.

you forget that most men are faster and stronger than women. i don't care how many black belts she has, mcdojos or not. if i decide to take a swing, she's not going to be able to react before i clock her. and if she's lucky enough to block, i doubt her block will slow me down much before i drop her to the floor.

My sister models and had a photo shoot with a guy she knows. My mom wanted me to go with her. My sister, she's 24, insisted she could look after herself. She's about 5'5 all of 120 pounds. Nothing bad happened, but the point is, many young women just don't realize how vulnerable they really are.

They think that their "no" is the final word. That's one reason rape is so shocking to them. Young women see, in real time, how powerless they are against a man determined to do what he wants and her "no" is just a privilege granted.

It happened that I also knew her mother, a chronic alcoholic with a taste for violent boyfriends, the latest of whom had been stabbed in the heart a few weeks before in a pub brawl. The surgeons in my hospital saved his life; and to celebrate his recovery and discharge, he had gone straight to the pub. From there, he went home, drunk, and beat up my patient's mother.Apple, tree, you get the picture.